Foterra x Ava Bock Jewelry

Reflections on the First Foterra x Ava Bock Jewelry Collection

Reflections on a Five-Year Collaboration

In 2020, much of life paused.

I was undergoing treatment for stage three breast cancer during the first year of the pandemic. My energy was limited, access to materials had become unpredictable, and many of my usual ways of working were disrupted. Still, the need to keep creating remained. Around the same time, Morgan and Josh, the founders of Foterra Jewelry, were navigating changes within their own practice. Their work had centered on translating place-based photography into wearable objects, but the pandemic disrupted many of the places and systems through which that work normally reached people.

Our collaboration began as an experiment. Neither of us knew whether my abstract work would translate successfully into jewelry. Unlike the photography Foterra had previously worked with, my images weren't originally created at that scale or for that purpose. We began testing what happened when we isolated portions of existing artwork, reduced them, and transformed them into something wearable.

Many of the first attempts failed. Some became little more than indistinct areas of color. Others revealed technical problems as saturation, scale, edges, and the resin coating changed how the original image was perceived. What worked as an artwork did not necessarily survive translation into a much smaller object. That process of failure became part of understanding what the collaboration could be. Eventually, several pieces began to resolve. Portal, Lachesis, and Covid Connection #1 were among the early works that retained something essential from their source imagery while becoming objects with a presence of their own. Those experiments became the foundation of a collaboration that has continued for five years.

Over that time, the project has allowed me to think differently about scale, reproduction, material, and what happens when an image leaves its original format. A detail from an artwork can become something intimate enough to hold or wear, while the process of translating it inevitably changes how the image is experienced.

This fall, we will release our third collection together. What began as an uncertain experiment during an equally uncertain period has developed through five years of testing, adaptation, and learning what these works can become in another form. Looking back at those first experiments, including the ones that failed, I am reminded that collaboration doesn't always begin with a clear understanding of what the finished work will become.

Sometimes its value is in discovering that together.